Ah, Roma - grand and ancient city.

Actually, before we get to discussing Rome, there is one major thing that I forgot to mention, and that is Pisa. You may have heard of it, it's renowned for having one of the worlds shittest bits of civil engineering - the leaning tower of Pisa. Wow, it really is sunken on one side.

I am sure you all know what it looks like, but there are a couple of things worth mentioning. The first thing is that you would not believe the amount of tourists there trying to do the tricky photo showing themselves trying to hold up the tower. Without word of a lie, I reckon in the hour or so that we were there, I saw at least 15 couples trying to do variations on that photo. There must be a couple of hundred thousand photos of Pisa in the world showing people holding it up.

The other thing worth mentioning about Pisa is that we happened to be there on a day when the wind was blowing in the same direction as the lean. This was cool because you could stand at the bottom of the thing and look up, and the clouds flying over the top and the resulting optical illusion made it look like the tower was falling over towards you. That piss weak description probably doesn't do the experience justice, but hopefully you get the idea.

Anyway, like I was saying, Rome.

What a totally amazing city. Do you know there are at least 3 levels of Rome? Over the years they have just filled in the old cities with dirt and built on top. It bends your head. They only have 2 subway trains in Rome, because everytime they go to dig a new tunnel, they find more ruins.

We split our visit to the city of Rome over two days.

The first day was spent looking at the the popular sites. First stop was the very amazing colleseum. The thing is as big as AAMI stadium, and yet was built in 72-80AD. It sat 50,000 in it's hey day, and had facility to put up a thin linnen roof in Summer and a rain proof roof in Winter. Amazing. I was sitting in there and I just couldn't get Life of Brian out of my head "Are you the PFJ?" "Why do you want to be a woman, Stan?". Ahem.

The other thing is you know how half of it is now missing, its not because it has fallen down with age or poor building standards. It's just that when the Popes took over Rome, and they were looking for bits to build thier churches, the colleseum seemed to have everything they needed so they just flogged whatever they could.

After the colleseum, we headed up the road (a very old Roman road, with chariot tracks worn in) to the Forum of ancient rome, which must be one of the biggest archealogical digs in the world. It is amazing, and I have tons of photos which you will see soon I promise, but you walk around and feel like you are in ancient Rome. Pillars and remnants of ancient buidings everywhere.

As we were standing by the block that Marc Antony stood on to make his famous speech, the lady who was running the walking tour we were on asked if anyone knew who stood there and what he said. Being a smart ass like I am sometimes, I proudly said "Friends, Roman's, Countrymen, lend me your ears!". She then invited me to stand on the very block and repeat it for the rest of the 3 trillion tourists around the place, and having no shame I had to oblige. I guess you had to be there.

Feeling a bit ruined - out, so to speak we went to see a Roman wonder that was still standing, the Basilica. An amazing Pagan church, converted by the Vatican in the 4th century to a catholic church. It is famous for its perfectly spherical roof, with a big hole in the roof to let the sun in. It also lets the rain in, so the clever romans built drains in the floor that run into the aquaduct. You can also tell the time in there, by where the sun shines on the floor. Unfortunately it's an hour slow in daylight saving time.

That made it lunchtime. We had some pizza and gelati (hey, when in Rome....) and went on our way to see the Trevi fountain. On the way I managed to pick up a very cool reprint of the thatrical poster for the Godfather's Italian release, and Karen used her Thailand honed haggling skills to help our friend Sarah buy some genuine (wink, wink) Gucci handbags from a guy on the street.

We marvelled at the sculptures on the fountain, threw in a couple of coins each as per tradition, and headed for the Spanish Steps.

When we got there, the church which the steps lead to was covered in scaffolding, and there was no flowers since it was mid summer, so it didn't look as speccy as any of the photos that I have seen, but that's life I guess.

By this time our throbbing feet couldn't take much more, but there was just one more thing I had to see before we caught the subway back to the hotel. The Circus Maximus.

The Circus Maximus was the chariot racing track. In itself it is just a big space with a worn track, but it was pretty cool to imagine ancient roman bogans at their equivalent of the speedway with mullets and skin tight black togas and wives with missing teeth passing them wine and grapes out of the esky.